Glenroy Sinclair, Assignment Coordinator

More than a decade after the United Kingdom Judicial Committee of the Privy Council recommended that his death sentence should be commuted to life imprisonment in a landmark ruling for the Caribbean, Earl Pratt will be released this month from prison.

"The Department of Correctional Services is awaiting a formal notification regarding the status of parole applicants for May 2007," Major Richard Reese, commissioner of corrections, disclosed yesterday.

The Gleaner understands that Pratt, now in his 50s, and another high-profile inmate, Mary Lynch, 62, who was convicted for killing her husband in the early 1990s, are likely to be released as early as next Friday, but Commissioner Reese is awaiting the parole unit to complete the paper work.

The 1994 Privy Council ruling was a landmark case for Pratt and his long-time friend, Ivan Morgan, who later died of natural causes in prison. Both were sentenced to death for the October 6, 1977 murder of Junior Bissick. On three separate occasions the death warrant was read to them and they were removed to the condemned cells, located next door the gallows, at the St. Catherine correctional facility, the maximum-security prison in the parish.

Breach of their rights

But after waiting more than five years to be executed, the U.K. Privy Council cited a breach of their constitutional rights, under Section 17 (1) of the Constitution Act, which provides that 'no person shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading punishment'. This was after they had appealed the case.

The Privy Council recommended in 1994 that because Pratt and Morgan were on death row for more than five years after their conviction, they should not be hanged. At the time, the recommendation of the UK Privy Council provided reprieve for 110 other death row inmates in Jamaica, who were also waiting for more than five years to be executed. No one has been hanged in Jamaica since 1988.